In the past few years, Synology has upped their game when it comes to video surveillance. Long established as a NAS leader, Synology’s Surveillance Station and companion apps have been expanding the company into the IP security video space with the same well-designed approach that has made their network storage solutions extremely popular. Now, a wireless camera joins their surveillance line card, and I can say that I’m impressed.
The CC400W joins the Synology camera lineup as their first Wi-Fi-connected CCTV camera. It’s an outdoor-rated 4 MP camera in a cube form factor, with max resolution of 2560×1440 @ 30 FPS. The CC400W is USB-powered, and you can record to microSD when the link back to your DiskSstation or Synology NVR is out. Complete hardware specs are here. Synology calls it AI-enabled
I have been putting the camera through it’s paces in a number of scenarios. It adopts to the Surveillance Station fantastically quickly, and has been a very good dual-band wireless client on Wi-Fi networks built from Meraki, Mist, and Ubiquiti. I run a DS1618+ DiskStation, with a mix of Synology and third-party cameras in the Surveillance Station package. It may have taken 90 seconds if that to get the new CC400W onto the WLAN and adopted by Surveillance Station.
Even if you don’t do any of the fancy stuff, the new camera is quite nice in it’s imaging in both day and night scenarios.
I found all images in the various lighting scenarios to be at least very good, and usually great. Night vision in my environment was more effective inside than out, but I have a lot of ground lighting in the vicinity to torture cameras with. For the price point and technology involved, the digital zoom performance is quite acceptable.
One area where Synology shines in it’s approach is in ease of configuring advanced settings- like people and motion detection and geofencing for intrusion detection:
These settings are the “AI-enabled” part of Synology’s video magic. If I settle on a permanent location for the CC400W then I will enable detection and set up zones as applicable. Right now I’m still testing various capabilities as I relocate the wireless camera around the different buildings on my property.
There is a lot to appreciate with the Synology CC400W. It really is a nice addition to the Synology surveillance video environment, and I may even end up paring this with a solar powered battery pack at some point where I don’t have an AC outlet available.
Let’s close this out with how it looks in the DS Cam companion app.
wirednot 